Laptops beat tablets as most-coveted gift

The No. 1 item kids want for Christmas isn’t an iPhone or tablet, it’s a laptop computer, according to a survey at eBates.com.

Laptops are swiftly followed by the latest iPhone as the No. 2 choice. We said “swiftly” because singer Taylor Swift is the No. 1 celebrity influencing the gift wish list for girls between 8 and 12.

Ebate.com, the source of this info, is a site we seldom think to go to, but it has discount coupons and free shipping. Another good one for discounts is FatWallet.com. They have a “Black Friday Deal Finder.” The name is somewhat misleading, because it isn’t limited to Black Friday, but lists deals all the way through December. These are announced on the site before they show up in stores.

A PEN FOR THE CLOUD
Here’s something for the person who hates typing. It’s the LiveScribe Sky WiFi Smartpen, and it digitizes your handwriting, records the lecture you’re listening to and stores it all in the cloud.

The $170 list price is for the base model. If you want more than two gigabytes of storage, the next step up is as expensive as the new $200 Chromebook laptop from Acer. But it is definitely something different, and kind of a wow.

The pen comes with a special notepad that is sensitized to react to the pen tip. The pad also contains a camera and a microphone. Tap a button on that pad to turn on WiFi. Tap another button to connect to the Internet. Tap a third button to start recording a lecture. Later, tap a word you wrote — something you consider a key point in that lecture — and listen to what the lecturer was saying at that moment. All is stored online in a free Evernote account.

Everything depends on how patient you are during the learning phase. We watched a techie-type guy try it out in a video on Engadget.com, and he was clearly baffled a couple of times when the pen was slow to respond. However, there are over a million LiveScribe users, so one would guess most of them got the hang of it.

The price of the new version is high, but you can get last year’s model for half the price, if you don’t mind using a docking station to sync to the Web. See the whole thing at LiveScribe.com.

JUST SCAN IT
The Doxie One is a portable scanner that needs no computer. Push a button and your piece of paper is digitized and saved to an SD memory card. The device sells for $149, and it can also save the scan directly to the Web. The Doxie Go sells for $50 more and runs on a battery.

Load the software that comes with it directly into your computer. An app syncs your scanned documents with an iPad, Mac or PC and makes them searchable. That’s a key issue. Because normally, a scanned document is just an image of whatever you scanned and cannot be searched or edited.

What reads the document you scanned is a program called Abbyy Fine Reader, a Russian character recognition program we have tried several times over the past few years, and it is excellent. This comes included on the disk. Abbyy reads scanned documents and makes them searchable. (Oddly enough, if you were to buy the full version of Abbyy Fine Reader, it would cost $30 more than this scanner with its software.)

CROWDSOURCING SCIENCE
Getting people to pitch in and fund a new project is commonplace, but here’s something new: using crowd funding to develop a scientific breakthrough.

The Economist magazine recently listed three important sites. One is RocketHub.com, where a Florida anthropologist raised more than $12,000 to study the DNA of Roman skeletons. Another is PetriDish.org, which was used by the California Academy of Sciences to discover a new species of ant. On Microryza.com, scientists have raised more than $9,000 to fund a “worm-free world.” They mean those icky worms that enter your body, not the ones in your garden.

HOLIDAY GAME
We don’t know if the new PBS-TV special “The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About Christmas” will rival the Peanuts Christmas special, but the PBS website has a free kids’ game to tie in with the show.

It’s called “Freeze Your Knees, Follow Me Please,” and although the game action is basic, the Dr. Seuss drawings make it cute. There are seven other games on the site. Find them at PBSkids.org and click “Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About Christmas.”

TRADING IN OLD IPADS
October set a record for iPad trade-ins, according to SellCell.com, a site where you can trade in yours. People are trading in the third-generation iPad to get the iPad Mini or fourth-generation iPad. They typically get about $350 for the iPad 3, which sold for $699. The iPad 2, which brought in $371 before the Mini was announced, now typically goes for less than $200. Android tablets bring in even less. The only non-Apple items on the top 10 list of trade-ins are the BlackBerry Playbook, the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Asus PadFone.